(no subject)
It ought to be universally understood and intimately felt, that, in regard to children, all precept and example; all kindness and harshness ; all rebuke and com- mendation; all forms, indeed, of direct or indirect education, afiect mental growth, just as dew, and sun, and shower, or untimely frost, afiect vegeta- ble growth. Their influences are integrated and made one with the soul.
Education, more than any thing else, demands not only a scientific acquaintance with mental laws, but the nicest art in the detail and the application of means, for its successful prosecution ; because inlfiuences, imperceptible m childhood, work out more and more broadly into beauty or deformity,in after-life. No unskilful hand should ever play upon a harpj where the tones are left, forever, in the strings.
Acquirement and pleasure should go hand in hand. They should never part company. The pleasure of acquiring should be the incitement to acquire.
Nor is the motive of fear preferable. Fear is one of the most debasing and dementalizing of all the pas- sions. The sentiment of fear was given us, that it might be roused into action, by whatever should be shunned, scorned, abhorred. The emotion should never be associated with what is to be desired, toiled for, and loved. If a child appe- tizes his books, then, lesson-getting is free labor. If he revolts at them, then, it is slave-labor. Less is done, and the little is not so well done. Nature has implanted a feeling of curiosity in the breast of every child, as if to make herself certain of his activity and progress.
Men sit with folded arms, even while they are surrounded by objects of which they know nothing. Who ever saw that done by a child? But we cloy, disgust, half-extirpate, this appetite for knowl- edge, and then deny its existence. Mark a child, when a clear, well-defined, vivid conception seizes it. The whole nervous tissue vibrates. Every muscle leaps. Every joint plays. The face becomes auroral. The spirit flashes through the body, like lightning through a cloud.
I have good reasons for remembering one of another class of schoolhouses, which the scientific would probably call the sixth order of architecture, - the wicker-work order, summer-houses for winter res- idence, - where there never was a severely cold day, without the ink's freezing in the pens of the scholars while they were writing; and the teacher was literally obUged to compromise between the suflferings of those who were exposed to the cold of the windows and those exposed to the heat of the fire, by not raising the thermometer of the latter above ninety degrees, until that of the former fell below thirty. A part of the children suffered the Arctic cold of Captains Ross and Parry, and a part, the torrid heat of the Landers, without, in either case, winning the honors of a discoverer. It was an excellent place for the teacher to illustrate one of the facts in geography ; for five steps would have carried him through the five zones.
This is the philosophy of children's hating study. We insulate them by fear ; we touch them with non-conductors; and then, because they emit no spark, we gravely aver that they are non-electric bodies.
I'm definitely enjoying this article -- Mann has a way of hitting just so with his descriptions.
Education, more than any thing else, demands not only a scientific acquaintance with mental laws, but the nicest art in the detail and the application of means, for its successful prosecution ; because inlfiuences, imperceptible m childhood, work out more and more broadly into beauty or deformity,in after-life. No unskilful hand should ever play upon a harpj where the tones are left, forever, in the strings.
Acquirement and pleasure should go hand in hand. They should never part company. The pleasure of acquiring should be the incitement to acquire.
Nor is the motive of fear preferable. Fear is one of the most debasing and dementalizing of all the pas- sions. The sentiment of fear was given us, that it might be roused into action, by whatever should be shunned, scorned, abhorred. The emotion should never be associated with what is to be desired, toiled for, and loved. If a child appe- tizes his books, then, lesson-getting is free labor. If he revolts at them, then, it is slave-labor. Less is done, and the little is not so well done. Nature has implanted a feeling of curiosity in the breast of every child, as if to make herself certain of his activity and progress.
Men sit with folded arms, even while they are surrounded by objects of which they know nothing. Who ever saw that done by a child? But we cloy, disgust, half-extirpate, this appetite for knowl- edge, and then deny its existence. Mark a child, when a clear, well-defined, vivid conception seizes it. The whole nervous tissue vibrates. Every muscle leaps. Every joint plays. The face becomes auroral. The spirit flashes through the body, like lightning through a cloud.
I have good reasons for remembering one of another class of schoolhouses, which the scientific would probably call the sixth order of architecture, - the wicker-work order, summer-houses for winter res- idence, - where there never was a severely cold day, without the ink's freezing in the pens of the scholars while they were writing; and the teacher was literally obUged to compromise between the suflferings of those who were exposed to the cold of the windows and those exposed to the heat of the fire, by not raising the thermometer of the latter above ninety degrees, until that of the former fell below thirty. A part of the children suffered the Arctic cold of Captains Ross and Parry, and a part, the torrid heat of the Landers, without, in either case, winning the honors of a discoverer. It was an excellent place for the teacher to illustrate one of the facts in geography ; for five steps would have carried him through the five zones.
This is the philosophy of children's hating study. We insulate them by fear ; we touch them with non-conductors; and then, because they emit no spark, we gravely aver that they are non-electric bodies.
I'm definitely enjoying this article -- Mann has a way of hitting just so with his descriptions.